Quincy nurse who helped at finish line describes year of guilt, anxiety, pride

Tuesday

Apr 15, 2014 at 6:00 AM

Bill Dockham, a former emergency medical technician who now works with veterans as a primary care nurse, said the number and severity of injuries he saw in the medical tent on April 15, 2013, were unlike anything he had seen.

Neal Simpson The Patriot Ledger @nsimpson_ledger

Bill Dockham was so close to the first explosion that the medical tent shook around him.

With no windows to look through, Dockham had to watch on a small television as chaos suddenly broke out a few dozen feet from where he stood near the Boston Marathon finish line. Moments later, the first victims started coming in.

“My first thought then was, ‘I’m going to die today,’” said Dockham, a Quincy nurse who was volunteering in the main medical tent when two bombs ripped through the crowds at the finish line last year, “and you’re thinking of running, but you just pull together and do what you have to do.”

For Dockham and other marathon medical volunteers, the past year has been marked by periods of anxiety, fear, guilt and, on better days, a sense of pride in their work and in the remarkable recoveries of many of the bombing victims who came through their tent that day. Dockham said nearly all the volunteers have vowed to return to the finish line this spring, some as runners hoping to complete their first marathon, and others as volunteers working side by side with the same doctors and nurses that bandaged wounds, held hands and triaged patients amid the aftermath of last year’s attack.

Dockham, a former emergency medical technician who now works with veterans as a primary care nurse, said the number and severity of injuries he saw in the tent on April 15, 2013, were unlike anything he had seen. One of the first victims he saw was Jeff Bauman, a spectator who lost two legs in the explosion. Dockham later found himself bandaging the foot of a woman who had lost the back half of her heel.

Those images lingered with Dockham in the days and weeks after the bombing, even as he deliberately avoided most news reports about the attack. He found himself growing anxious in crowds or around people with backpacks, as well as during loud thunderstorms. The other volunteers in the medical tent began sharing their experiences through an email list, which then became a Facebook group that attracted more than 150 members. A week after the attack, several of them returned to Copley Square to see what had become the beginning of a memorial to the bombing victims.

But even as he found comfort in the camaraderie of his fellow volunteers, Dockham was still tormented by memories of marathon day. One day, when his Red Line commute was disrupted by a mechanical failure, he felt his anxiety growing as South Station rapidly filled with frustrated commuters.

“I finally had to leave the station,” he said. “I had to take the commuter train home because I couldn’t take that crowd.”

At Dockham’s work – an outpatient veterans affairs clinic in downtown Boston – his patients learned that Dockham had been at the finish line and began telling him personal stories of how they had managed their own post-traumatic stress. At one point, he found himself buying a bunch of plug-in air fresheners, something he later learned can be helpful for people after a traumatic event.

Dockham said many of his fellow volunteers also felt a crippling sense of guilt in the weeks following the marathon as they agonized over whether they had done enough to help. But the miraculous stories of recovery that have emerged over the last year – victims learning to walk, run and dance again, sometimes with the help of prosthetic limbs – have eased the volunteers’ guilt and aided in their own recovery.

Dockham is having fewer “bad days” now, but he’s prepared for the anxiety to return when he walks into the tent where he saw so many missing limbs and gaping wounds a year ago. He and several other medical volunteers vowed last year that they would return to the tent and he said he’s never had a second thought since.

“Going in there, we’re all going to have it in the back of our mind that, yes, something could happen again,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I think the closure for us – for me at least and most of us – is just being there again, doing it again, and not letting terrorists win.”

Contact Neal Simpson at nesimpson@ledger.com or follow him on Twitter @NSimpson_Ledger.